"One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Microsoft's patent attorneys, who are suing numerous Android vendors and just today announced that another manufacturer has agreed to write checks to Microsoft every time it ships an Android device. Microsoft's latest target is Wistron Corp., which has signed a patent agreement 'that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for Wistron's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome platform', Microsoft announced." That's the reality we live in, folks. This is at least as criminal - if not more so - than Microsoft's monopoly abuse late last century. After the Nortel crap, it's completely left the black helicopter camp for me: Microsoft, Apple, and several others are working together to fight Android the only way they know how: with underhand mafia tactics. Absolutely sickening. Hey Anonymous, are you listening? YES I WENT THERE.

Real life example - Apple's iOS touch algorithms.
So far nobody has been able to copy them. That is the reason Android has this reaction delay to input.

Apple may not have been granted a patent on it yet, but I couldn't find if they even patented.

You seem to really hate all those mathematicians and physicists that come up and came up with most mathematics and physics behind all the innovation. Why aren't you giving them any credit? Because they spend years and years in research labs, yet their work and their ideas are not patentable.
However a schmuck surfaces that has spent as little as 6 months on selecting the most obvious* mathematical formula, gets a patent on a "new" algorithm and rips the rewards of the years that mathematician spent proving his formula...

* - to a mathematician, not the schmuck

I already said it once and I'll say it again - R&D costs do not reflect the effort required for R&D. Specially in software. R&D costs reflect how much a company poured into the development of the software.